Welding a material is a common and well known procedure in a manufacturing process. The material being welded, typically a metal of some type, is altered by the weld process into a form that may be at least as strong as the original material to be welded. Many industries, e.g., manufacturers of mobile machines such as earthworking machines, transport machines, and the like, rely on welding as an integral part of the manufacturing process.
The welding process, however, creates undesirable side effects in the material to be welded. Distortions occur from the intense heat being used, and the resultant material may not maintain the desired shape when welding is completed.
Therefore, in the welding industry, it is common to employ techniques prior to the weld process which induce distortions in the material which are essentially the opposite as the distortions induced by the welding process. The intent of these induced distortions is to cause the material, during welding, to distort back to the original desired shape. Techniques such as pre-cambering, i.e., bending the material into a temporary distorted shape, and pre-straining, i.e., bending the material into a permanent distorted shape, are often used.
These pre-distortion techniques, however, can only be learned by trial and error, and long-term experience. Therefore, the process becomes very costly in time and wasted material, and is cumbersome when changes in the material are made, since the trial and error process must be repeated for each change.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.